 Dakota
Kraut: Collected Notes on How I Learned to Love My Accent and Ancestry,
1983-2003
By Ronald J. Vossler
Illustration by Andrea Trenbeath
Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University
Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota, 2003, 270 pages, softcover
The Germans from Russia Heritage collection is pleased to announce
publication of its fifth book by Ronald J. Vossler. Other books authored
by Vossler and published by the GRHC are: 1) Lost
Shawls and Pig Spleens: Folklore, Anecdotes, and Humor of the Germans
from Russia; 2) Not
Until the Combine Is Paid and Other Jokes From the Oral Traditions
of the Germans from Russia; 3) We'll
Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American
Relatives, 1925-1937; and 4) Why
I Never Called Death a River, and Other Voices from the Valley of
Hope: A Prairie Album.
Dakota Kraut, the
sixth book by award-winning writer Ronald J. Vossler, a Senior Lecturer
in the English Department at the University of North Dakota, Grand
Forks, brings together twenty years of the author's publications
in magazines, journals, newspapers, and websites. Included are also
a radio-play, two poems, and one of the author's nationally award-winning
documentary film-scripts. Subtitled "Collected Notes on
How I Learned to Love My Accent and Ancestry, 1983-2003,"
this collection is a must read for anyone interested in evocative
writing about ethnicity, memory, and a small-town prairie past.
The book begins with a poetic prologue, "God's Eye" -
given that title for the highest window on a grain elevator which
overlooks the author's mid-century childhood home in small town
Dakota; and ends with an epilogue which brings readers back to that
grain elevator, as the author understands how his prairie hometown
has become, "My Russia: a place I can't forget,
nor find again."
In between the prologue and epilogue are 31 different entries,
collected from the journals and magazines and newspapers where they
were originally published. There are meditative memoirs, like the
one in which the author, in his childhood, helps his old world grandparents
with butchering chickens. ("Baptism") There is an article
about high school basketball games, in which prairie gymnasiums
are described as "cathedrals of our innocence." ("Hardwood
Glory") Some entries paint vivid portraits of farm-work, such
as rock and bale hauling. An entire section is devoted to "Forgotten
Homelands," as the author seeks out his, and his own ethnic
group's, ancestral past in journeys to Ukraine, Germany, and France,
where in a small village he sings old German dialect songs with
distant relatives.
By turns, this collection can be humorous, serious, thought-provoking,
and entertaining, with its precise, and forgiving, portraits of
cranky relatives and small-town eccentrics. (see "Outdoor Basketball,
with Irgey") Vossler's relatives and acquaintances populate
this book like characters in a Balzac novel; even when he moves
away to college - in the beautifully crafted essay "Eternal
Freundschaft" - he inadvertently ends up boarding
with his grandfather's cousin. There are also glimpses, as well
as prolonged meditations, of prairie church congregations singing
old German spirituals ("Of Mother Tongue and Sorrow Song");
and of Sunday afternoons on the front lawn of the author's childhood
home, when relatives gather and visit, speaking in the distinct
mixture of German and English. ("Chairs")
Primarily fact, but with "some exaggerations," as the
author admits in his "Introduction," this rich, wide-ranging
book is a welcome addition for any reader seeking to understand
the Germans from Russia ethnic group, who settled in the U.S. between
1881-1914, and whose descendants now comprise at least 35% of North
Dakota's population. Dakota Kraut is a rumination on the
fast-disappearing world of the prairie Germans in Dakota: it is
also a literary work with power and grace and insight into the human
heart - even if the heart is an ethnic one.
Dakota Kraut
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